A Vanitas with a skull in a niche, an interior in the background

This intriguing picture had long been attributed to Cornelis Engelbrechtsz., until it was recently recognized by Prof. Dr. Jan Piet Filedt Kok, formerly of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, to be a work by a Southern Netherlandish. Both he and Dr. John Oliver Hand, of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, have pointed out that the painted skull would originally have comprised part of a folding diptych as the outside cover of one wing (see also Hélène Vergoustraete, 'Diptychs with instructions for use', in J.O. Hand and R. Spronk, eds., Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandisch Diptych, Cambridge, New Haven and London, 2006, pp. 156-171).

One of the earliest examples of a skull being depicted on the outside cover of a diptych is found in the oeuvre of Hans Memling - a skull in a niche can be seen on the verso of a depiction of Saint John the Baptist in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, which used to form a private diptych altar together with an image of Saint Veronica, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (see Hand, Spronk and C. Metzger, eds., Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, Cambridge, New Haven and London, 2006, pp. 170-7, no. 25). Jan Provoost painted a similar skull on the outside cover of a diptych with 'Christ carrying the Cross and A portrait of a fifty-four-year-old Franciscan', now in the Sint-Jan-Hospitaalmuseum, Bruges (see Prayers and Portraits, op. cit., pp. 210-7, cat. 31). While both Memling and Provoost depict their skulls in a feigned niche, the present lot appears to be an unprecedented iconographic novelty, with a detailed and delicately-painted view of an interior behind the main subject.